Jim Gentile had 21 multiple-home-run games, the most historic one coming in 1961 when he hit grand slams in back-to-back innings. More obscure, but no less interesting, was a two-homer effort at Fenway Park three years later. Playing for the Kansas City A’s, the man known as ‘Diamond Jim’ triggered a skirmish in the Red Sox dugout with his dingers.

“A dear friend of mine, Dick Stuart, was playing first base for Boston,” the now-86-year-old Gentile told me recently. “They finished batting practice, and as I was walking up to the cage, he yelled at me, ‘Diamond, how ya hitting ‘em?’ Then he threw me his bat, and said I should try it. On my first swing, I hit the ball into the bullpen. I got out of the cage and went to throw it back to him, and he said, ‘No, keep it.’

Bill Monbouquette was on the mound for the Boston that day. A solidly-built right-hander, ‘Monbo’ not only had a no-hitter and a 20-win season on his resume, he was a self-described red-ass (a segment in this 2015 Sunday Notes column serves as evidence). If Gentile didn’t already know that, he would soon find out… albeit from a safe distance.

“Come game time, I’ve got my bat in my hands,” recalled Gentile. “I’ve also got Stuart’s bat in my hands. I figured, ‘Heck, I’m going to use his.’ I probably shouldn’t have. There’s kind of an unwritten rule that if someone gives you something like that, you wait until you get out of town. But I walked up there with his bat, and hit the ball in the bullpen. A couple innings later, I hit another one in the bullpen.”

As Gentile was rounding the bases, Red Sox catcher Bob Tillman picked up the bat and saw Stuart’s name on it. Moreover, he told Monboquette. Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s calling card has always been his dizzying array of pitches. Hard cutter, slow cutter, curve, knuckle curve, slow curve, shuuto — if you can name it, he can probably throw it in a major league game. That’s not an obviously great skill, in the same way as Gerrit Cole’s overpowering fastball or Jacob deGrom’s ability to throw sliders in the mid 90’s with command, but the results speak for themselves: Darvish has the third-highest career strikeout rate of any starter, active or otherwise, and impressive run prevention numbers to boot: his career ERA- and FIP- both check in at a sterling 82.

So okay, fine, Yu Darvish has two calling cards: tons of pitches and the ability to use those pitches effectively. Let’s talk about the tons of pitches today, though, because they’re way more fun. Consider, if you will, the two systems we use to classify pitches. Darvish’s career looks like a bingo board on both, but they’re two very different bingo boards. First, our standard pitch types:

It’s a little bit of everything, with a heavy emphasis on cutters in the last two years. Meanwhile, the sliders have gotten slow — a near-career-low 79.9 mph, nearly as slow as his curveball, which has gotten fast. It’s a confusing mess. Next, take a look at pitch types per Pitch Info:

Rafts of sliders! More curveballs! The only thing the two systems seem to agree on is the 3.6% splitters, thrown at a dizzying 90 mph. You can’t see Pitch Info’s velocity numbers on here, but they’re divergent as well: these cutters are blazing, checking in at 92.3 mph, and the sliders are much faster than the first classification set, checking in at 86 mph.

What’s happening here is that the two systems don’t know what to do with Darvish’s array of breaking balls. Say, for the sake of argument, that Darvish throws seven different breaking balls, each with a different velocity and movement profile. Try to classify those using three buckets: cutter, slider, and curveball. Good luck! Here’s a pitch that Baseball Info Solutions, which doubles as our generic “Pitch Types” data source, classified as a cutter last night:

Looks like a cutter to me, or maybe a four-seamer that he over-cut inadvertently. It has a hair of glove-side break, which moves it from where O’Hearn thinks he’s swinging — middle-in fastball, a juicy first pitch target — to where he’s actually swinging, directly over the inside corner. At 93 mph, that’s a nasty pitch, no doubt, and it’s also pretty clearly a cut fastball. Darvish, who throws his four-seam fastball in the 95-96 mph range, is hardly throwing a 93 mph slider.

That was a gimme. How about this one?

Victor Caratini’s overzealous framing aside, that looks like a pretty different pitch to me. It’s slower, and bendier; if the last pitch had a hair of break, this one has an entire bearskin rug. It doesn’t have that cutter-esque ride, either. Just one problem: Darvish, by his own admission, throws two types of cutters. So maybe that’s a cutter too.

And what about this one?

Aside from Caratini’s framing paying off, that looks like a completely different pitch. It has as much vertical break as horizontal, and it’s 10 mph slower than the first cutter we looked at. Maybe this one’s a slider, then.

But what about this one, literally the previous pitch?

That’s even slower, but it has less drop; that looks more like a textbook slider, mostly glove-side break, though not a ton of break at that. East-West movement in the low 80s? Sounds like a slider to me. Before you go calling that a slider, though, consider this pitch, which was classified as a slider:

Gravity took this one far more than the last one, despite almost identical velocity. How can those two be the same pitch? And don’t go calling it a curve, either, because I’ve got one of those to show you, and it’s more North-South despite similar velocity:

And of course, Darvish throws two different types of curves — three, really, though we haven’t seen the extremely slow curve/eephus yet this year. Take a look at this majestic lollipop:

I just showed you seven different pitches. None of them were obviously the same if you look at the three critical elements of a pitch: velocity, vertical break, and horizontal break. Try fitting them into three buckets — cutter, slider, and curve — and you start to see the problems inherent in classifying Darvish’s pitches.

Still, even if you don’t have the right names for things, there’s often some internal logic. Take Shane Bieber’s new arsenal, for example. He calls his pitches a cutter, slider, and curve. I looked at them and saw two curves and a slider. We’ve since reclassified the “hard slider” to a cutter and the “hard curve” to a slider, which gives you this graph for all of his pitches in 2020:

If you ignore the colors and shapes, there are five distinct spots. Quibble all day about what to call them — and we here at FanGraphs love to quibble, don’t get me wrong — but Bieber does five distinct things to the ball when he throws it, and that moves it into five distinct areas. Here’s Darvish’s 2020 chart:

This uses the Pitch Info classifications from above, which is why there are more “sliders” than “cutters,” but c’mon. These dots overlap. The edges bleed together, and there’s less center of mass. Some of the splitters are in the sinker quadrant, some in the slider quadrant. The cutters are everywhere, with some rising and some falling. The curveballs could easily be two pitches, and some could be sliders. Some of the curveballs have vertical movement if you don’t account for gravity!

When I set out to write this article, I wanted to talk about how Darvish was willing to throw any pitch in any count. The league as a whole decreases its fastball usage (excluding cutters) by five percentage points on two-strike counts. Darvish has thrown his more often with two strikes this year, 32.3% against 31% in all other counts. Take 0-0 out of the equation, and it’s even stranger: Darvish throws 43% fastballs to start an at-bat, then 24.5% fastballs until he hits two strikes, then 32.3% fastballs.

As I mulled over what to call each pitch and where to draw bright lines in describing his pitch usage, however, I changed my mind. Darvish isn’t exactly going against the grain, using his curveball when others would use their fastball and his slider when others would use their changeup. He changes each of his pitches so much, more run here or drop there, that while he does sometimes pitch against the grain, he sometimes throws a slider in a slider count and is still bucking convention, easier to do when you have fifteen sliders or whatever.

So in the end, forget all that noise. This isn’t an article about why Yu Darvish is great, at least not one of those nuts-and-bolts analytical articles where I show you the new pitch, show you how he’s using it in an interesting way, and then show you how that reduces hitters to a quivering mess in the batter’s box while unlocking fame and fortune for the pitcher.

This is an article about how fun it is to watch Darvish pitch and try to name the pitch he’s throwing. It’s wild. When he’s on, he can command them all at will — and as his 3.1% walk rate will tell you, he’s on right now. This form of Darvish is both dominant and delightful. Through three starts, he has a 2.12 ERA and a 1.63 FIP (2.99 xFIP). He has the second-most WAR among all pitchers this year, behind only Bieber. And yet, that’s not the fun part. The fun part is when he does this:

Which is a nasty enough pitch on its own, 97 on the black with some arm-side run to paint the corner, even if he missed Caratini’s target. But it’s not just that; it’s that in the same outing, he’s liable to do this:

And batters are so geared up for so many things that they just sometimes let it go by. Anyone can throw a 90 mph cutter that backs up and spins instead of breaking. When Darvish does it, though, you think hey, wait, maybe that was on purpose. Baseball is fun when you can analyze it, but it’s also fun when you’re left wondering, and no pitcher in baseball leaves me gleefully wondering more than Darvish right now.

If you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs, it would not be surprising if you describe your feelings about Tyler Chatwood as some kind of frustrated exasperation. Able to survive in the mile-high environment of Coors Field despite occasionally spotty control and an inability to punch out batters, the Cubs expected that Chatwood would do even better in the friendly confines of Wrigley; the days when the wind is blowing out in Chicago weren’t supposed to be much of a problem for a pitcher who largely avoided giving up big home run totals in Colorado. On that assumption, the Cubs signed Chatwood to a three-year, $38 million contract before the 2018 season.

Suffice it to say, 2018 did not go as anyone predicted or hoped, except maybe Cardinals fans. Chatwood’s season started deceptively well, with a 2.83 ERA in April, but 22 walks in 28 2/3 innings suggested trouble. After throwing seven shutout innings against the Brewers on April 29 of that year, he went three months without a single quality start and walked at least two batters in every game. The team’s acquisition of Cole Hamels resulted in Chatwood’s exile to the bullpen, where he was little-used until injuring his hip in an emergency start as a replacement for Mike Montgomery. A non-factor in the pennant race that September, Chatwood’s 103 2/3 innings of work for the season was still enough time to amass a league-leading 95 walks.

2019 went better, but Chatwood’s role was mostly that of a fill-in starter and low-leverage reliever and mop-up guy. His 4.28 FIP in relief didn’t send a tingle down anyone’s spine, and his decision to largely abandon his secondary stuff didn’t seem like a likely ticket back to the rotation. However in the second half, he did tinker with his cutter’s grip after recognizing an issue with the pitch, which he had largely moved away from in 2019:

https://twitter.com/MLBastian/status/1289773139409297408

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Cardinals got some bad news. Miles Mikolas, the team’s second-best pitcher and a valuable source of bulk innings, suffered a setback in dealing with the arm injury that had bothered him all year. He’ll need surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which will keep him out for all of 2020.

After a scintillating 2018 (2.83 ERA, 3.28 FIP, and a sixth-place finish in Cy Young voting), Mikolas came back to earth slightly in 2019. Even then, his pinpoint control and ability to coax grounders out of opposing batters gave him an excellent floor. While a 4.16 ERA might not sound impressive, it was better than league average in this homer-crazed era, and 184 innings of average pitching is hugely valuable.

The Cardinals came into this season with a competition for starting spots, but Mikolas wasn’t one of the competitors. He and Jack Flaherty would provide the guaranteed quality atop the rotation, while Adam Wainwright, Dakota Hudson, Carlos Martínez, Daniel Ponce de Leon, and Kwang Hyun Kim battled it out for the remaining three slots.

If there’s good news in Mikolas’s injury, it’s that deep bench of starting options. They’re all worse than Mikolas — all worse by a decent margin — but all five look to be quality major league options, which softens the blow. Ponce de Leon, who will take the hill today, made spot starts in 2018 and 2019 with solid results. We project him to be roughly 0.25 runs of ERA worse than Mikolas, which is hardly an unbridgeable gulf.

The real trouble begins if another Cardinals starter goes down. Kim is still an option, but he currently serves as the team’s closer, which is still a pretty wild sentence to write. The bullpen is already a little short-handed, though that should change as Giovanny Gallegos settles in and Alex Reyes and Génesis Cabrera return to the team. At the moment, however, Kim probably can’t stop closing, which leaves St. Louis in a bind. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is my latest in a series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. Previous installments of these rundowns, including potentially relevant context for discussion, can be found here:

AL East and Intro
NL East
AL Central

Chicago Cubs

Prospect List / Depth Chart

It’s likely top prospect Nico Hoerner sees a lot of time at second base and center field. The prospects ranked two through five in the system are all on the 60-man player pool. Of those, right-hander Adbert Alzolay and, to a lesser extent, catcher Miguel Amaya (who is now on the 40-man) are the two most likely to see some big league time this year. Were Willson Contreras to get hurt, I’m not sure if the club would let iffy defender Victor Caratini play every day, add veteran NRI Josh Phegley to the 40-man to share duties, or if they’d simply promote 21-year-old Amaya, who has been lauded for his maturity and advanced defense since he was 18.

I also think there’s a chance the Cubs are in the thick of it come September, consider 21-year-old lefty flamethrower Brailyn Marquez one of the org’s best dozen pitchers, and decide to bring him up as a late-inning relief piece. He’s going to be added to the 40-man this offseason regardless.

The other very young guys in the player pool are Christopher Morel and Brennen Davis, two big-framed, tooled-up developmental projects. It’s interesting that the Cubs added Morel ahead of Cole Roederer or any of their 2019 and 2020 college draftees, but the club is only at about 50 of their 60 allotted players and they clearly need more hitters in the offsite camp, so I expect several notable names to be part of the group in South Bend soon. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have been eagerly awaiting Hunter Greene’s return from Tommy John surgery. And for good reason. Prior to going under the knife 15 months ago he was hitting triple digits with his heater. Drafted second overall by the Reds in 2017 out of a Sherman Oaks, California high school, Greene is No. 77 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

According to Kyle Boddy, his return is nigh. Cincinnati’s pitching coordinator recently spent time with Greene in California, and he deemed the 20-year-old’s rehab “basically done.” Throwing in front of a Rapsoto, Greene was “an easy 97-plus [mph], reaching 100-101 when he was rearing back.”

More than a return to health is buoying the return to form. With the help of technology — “he’s really getting into the metrics and analytics” — and a former Chicago White Sox pitcher, Greene has made a meaningful change to his delivery. What had been “long arm action with a big wrap in the back” is now a shorter-and-cleaner stroke.

“That’s a credit to people like James Baldwin, who was the rehab coach and is now our Triple-A coach,” Boddy told me. “JB has worked with Hunter extensively, leaning on materials from Driveline Plus. Hunter has had a tendency to cut his fastball, so we’ve relied on a lot of video to show him how to fix that and get more carry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Long before Theo Epstein took his curse breaking talents to Chicago, helping to exorcise the demons of the Cubs’ past as the organization secured its biggest W in a century, it was two young pitchers who were supposed to fulfill that promise. I could write separate pieces on Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, but to me they’ll always be linked together in history, so it feels right to have them go as a tandem.

Kerry Wood donned the Cubbie Blue first. He was the first pitcher off the board in the 1995 draft, taken with the fourth pick behind other future major leaguers Darin Erstad, Ben Davis, and Jose Cruz. It’s not surprising that scouts liked Wood; Baseball America was correct in another respect: how quickly he would make the majors despite being a pitcher drafted still two weeks before his 18th birthday:

Wood has an exceptional arm. Not only is the velocity on his fastball equal to that of any pitcher in the draft, but it has heavy, late boring action. His curve also has a tight rotation, giving him two well above-average pitches that he throws with a minimum effort. Scouts say Wood is so advanced that he should be ready for the big leagues faster than all but one or two college pitchers.

This turned out to be almost exactly correct. Two advanced college pitchers, Brett Tomko and Matt Morris, debuted before Kerry Wood did. Indeed, BA’s report only missed the very nitpicky fact that Ariel Prieto (25 at the time), and two low-round relievers, Mike Judd and Jeff Wallace, also beat Wood to the bigs. The Cubs were not pleased when, two days after the team took Wood in the draft, Grand Prairie coaches let him pitch both games of a doubleheader, throwing a total of 175 pitches. Regardless, Wood’s path to the majors was relatively unimpeded and after two full seasons in the minors, he was called up at the start of the 1998 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Deshaies will be experiencing a first this summer. Along with his TV partner, Len Kasper — this assuming the season goes off as planned — Deshaies will be calling road games remotely. The Cubs duo won’t be alone. Per reports, broadcasters across both leagues are slated to do the same.

Deshaies hopes to be in Wrigley Field for the entire 60-game schedule. Rather than broadcasting away-action from a studio, the pitcher-turned-analyst envisions doing so, alongside Kasper, from the friendly confines of their home booth. He doesn’t see safety being an issue. As Deshaies put it, “Up there we’re in a wide open, well-ventilated space, and there wouldn’t be anyone else around. Plus, it would give us a little more of a ballpark atmosphere.”

Regardless of where they’re perched, things won’t be business as usual.

“It’s going to be kind of surreal, and weird,” said Deshaies, who is heading into his eighth season in Chicago after 16 in Houston. “I’ve never done [games remotely], but our tech people, producers, and directors are all really good. One thing they’ll need to make sure of is that we have monitors, and camera shots that will give us a live view. We’ll want to be able to see who is walking into the on-deck circle, who is warming up in the bullpen, and things like that.”

The nuts and bolts of the broadcasts will in some ways be the same. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2001, HBO Films aired a made-for-television movie called 61*, about the 1961 race between Yankees sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris as they attempted to topple the hallowed single-season home run record held by Babe Ruth. The movie opened with footage of Mark McGwire hitting his 60th home run in 1998, as actors playing Maris’ sons paged through a scrapbook their mother kept of their late father’s accomplishments. Soon enough, the movie delved into a dramatization of the 1961 race, with a script that reflected upon the question offered by 61*’s tagline: “Why did America have room in its heart for only one hero?”

Nineteen years later, Long Gone Summer, an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary that premiered on Sunday night, looks back at that 1998 race between McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and the brief stretch when the baseball world carried the two rival sluggers in its collective heart as the pair challenged a record that had stood for nearly four decades. While subsequent allegations about both players’ use of performance-enhancing drugs have dulled the luster of their achievements and astronomical home run totals — 70 for McGwire, 66 for Sosa — director A.J. Schnack’s movie is far less interested in scolding anyone than it is in reliving the excitement of the race and the mutual respect and camaraderie of the two rivals. That’s not to say that the topic of PED usage goes unaddressed, but it does take a back seat to what was, at the time, a feel-good story in a sport that was still recovering from the impact of the 1994 season-ending players’ strike.

I was one of more than three dozen people interviewed for Long Gone Summer, nearly all of whom were otherwise connected to the race as players, coaches, managers, executives, club employees, family members, broadcasters, or print media; to my eye, Effectively Wild’s Ben Lindbergh and MLB.com’s Jennifer Langosch were the only other participants besides myself who were outsiders at the time. It was a unique opportunity, and while my time onscreen was limited, I’m glad that the final product — which I only viewed for the first time late last week — turned out well while taking a lighter tack than we’ve seen over the past two decades. It’s not hard to find people, inside baseball or beyond, willing to rebuke McGwire, Sosa, and MLB itself for the game’s drug problem, as the annual Hall of Fame voting reminds us. Schnack, a native of Edwardsville, Illinois — about half an hour from St. Louis — and an award-winning documentarian whose previous credits include films covering They Might Be Giants and Kurt Cobain, chose a different route. In doing so, he secured the cooperation of both McGwire and Sosa, both of whom offer a generous share of recollections and introspection regarding that season 22 years ago.

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It’s not the year of a round-numbered anniversary, but as it’s a time without major league baseball, it will do. On Sunday at 9 pm ET, ESPN will air its premiere of Long Gone Summer, a 30 for 30 documentary on the 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they vied to break Roger Maris‘ single-season mark of 61 homers, which had stood since 1961. While subsequent allegations concerning performance-enhancing drugs have dulled the luster of the two sluggers’ astronomical totals — 70 for McGwire, 66 for Sosa — director AJ Schnack is far less interested in singling out the pair for scolding than in reliving the excitement of the race, and the camaraderie of the two rivals, which isn’t to say that the topic of PEDs goes unaddressed.

Indeed, Schnack, an award-winning filmmaker whose previous credits include documentaries about They Might be Giants and Kurt Cobain, has gone against the industry grain at least somewhat in making the movie. As he told Uproxx’s Mike Adams this week:

I grew up outside St. Louis, also went to Mizzou. I was a Cardinal fan. That summer really reconnected me with my childhood experience of enjoying sports and enjoying baseball, driving around with my dad, listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon on the radio. And when that summer happened, I’d moved to L.A. I was starting to work in film, and it just reconnected me with all of those feelings and the emotions and the excitement that I felt about baseball. So I felt like, yes, we now know that that summer took place in baseball’s steroid era. But, first, >especially for people younger than us, I want to just say this is what that felt like, to be in the middle of that summer.

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